Ansari X Prize

The Ansari X Prize was a $10 million prize, offered by the X-Prize Foundation, for
the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft
into space twice within two weeks. Its aim was to spur the development of
routine, low-cost, privately-funded spaceflight. The prize was won on October
4, 2004, 47 years to the day after the launch of Sputnik 1, by the Tier
One project using the experimental space plane SpaceShipOne.

Background

The X-Prize was created in 1996 in the spirit of a long history of aviation
prizes, most notably the Orteig Prize. Raymond Orteig, a wealthy hotel owner,
offered $25,000 to the first person to fly solo non-stop from New York to
Paris. The feat, achieved by Charles Lindbergh on May 20, 1927, spurred tremendous growth in the aviation industry. Within
a year of that feat, the number of pilots in the US tripled, the number
of planes quadrupled, and airline companies saw their passengers increase
30-fold. Moreover, nearly a quarter of all Americans viewed Lindbergh's
plane (the Spirit of St. Louis) in the year following his trans-Atlantic
flight.

It is in this spirit that X-Prize founders offered their $10 million prize.
Backed by a board of trustees (including Anousheh Ansari), "The New Spirit
of St. Louis Organization," and several well-funded supporters, the group
hopes to stimulate "the creation of a new generation of launch vehicles
designed to carry passengers into space."

Rules of the competition

The Ansari X Prize originally required that a team privately build, launch,
and finance a vehicle capable of carrying three passengers to a minimum
altitude of 100 kilometers (62.14 miles or 328,100 feet) – the boundary
of space as defined by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale –
and safely returning to Earth. A later modification in the rules allowed
test flights to be made with a single pilot and added ballast to compensate
for the weight of hypothetical passengers. In order to claim the prize,
the same vehicle had to repeat this trip twice within two weeks. According
to the rules and guidelines of the competition, no more than 10% of the
vehicle's non-propellant mass could be replaced between the first and second
flights as a demonstration of economic reusability.